


Evil Is What They Judge

by queenfanfiction



Category: Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: FNFF, FNFF Sandbox 2011, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-26
Updated: 2011-07-26
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:04:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenfanfiction/pseuds/queenfanfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anderson Cooper: TV personality, secret lover of Keith Olbermann, and the man behind New York's superhero "The Blue Shadow." Now, two years after the fall of Limbaugh, not one, but TWO other new superheroes are in town, along with a mysterious menace stealing some of the best minds in the world. It's up to Anderson to save the day - but can he do it alone? What will it take to protect Anderson's work, his life - and the man he loves?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evil Is What They Judge

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Blue Shadow](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3971) by dutchtulips. 



> Written for FNFF's Sandbox 2011. The original fic this is based on is Dutchtulips' [The Blue Shadow](http://earthvsoup.livejournal.com/2047.html). Many thanks to her for the permission to make her awesome canon part of my own. :D Title from a translation of Surat Al-Ankabut 29:4 from the Q'uran: "Or do those who do evil deeds think they can outrun Us? Evil is what they judge."

The Empire State Building, standing tall and proud above New York City, closes its observation decks to the public at 2am every night. But that fact didn't seem to bother Anderson Cooper, who was standing on the 102nd floor platform at just before 3am local time. Technically speaking, he wasn't the public.

It also didn't bother him, not really, that all elevators to the top floor had been shut down. He'd just taken the long way up instead.

Anderson stood atop the tallest building in the United States, dressed from head to toe in the dark blue costume that had earned him the title of "The Blue Shadow," and looked out onto the Manhattan skyline that twinkled with street and house lights at this time of night. His dark blue cape swirled in the eddy of the late spring breeze, and he absently pulled it closer around him, shivering a little as the night chill seeped through his spandex-thin outfit and into his bones.

Two years. It had been two years since his alter ego had exploded onto the New York scene, two years since he'd picked up this mantle as a way to do something more than just cover the news, as a way to actually _fix_ what he saw going wrong in the world. Two years since he'd revealed Rush Limbaugh for what he really was, a psychotic druggie with less of a soul than Anderson had been willing to give him credit for, and two years since said psychotic druggie had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York after Limbaugh's assassination attempt on President Obama had completely backfired.

In those two years, the skyline of Manhattan hadn't changed at all. The flickering of lights still comforted Anderson as he scanned the night for anything different, as he strained his ears to catch the slightest sound of any ongoing criminal activity with his sonic earbug. Nothing out of the ordinary registered, and Anderson relaxed with a small smile. All was as it should be, then.

In the quiet of the Manhattan evening, Anderson closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Two years was also how long it had been since the start of his relationship with Keith Olbermann. Over the course of those two years, they had gone from being cool acquaintances whenever the four of the Pundit Round Table (as Stephen had jokingly dubbed them) met for drinks on a Friday night, to the warmest of lovers who could hardly bear to spend a single night away from each other’s company. Anderson still blushed when he thought of how Keith had texted him - or, in the jargon of teens these days, "sexted" him - during Anderson's trip to London to cover the royal wedding. It had been hard enough to keep a straight face during taping, even more so when Anderson's make-up artist had commented on how pink Anderson was that day, which only made Anderson flush even more.

The Pundit Round Table had changed over those two years, as well. Anderson still clearly remembered waiting with Jon and Stephen at their booth sometime in September of last year while Keith excused himself to meet 'a special guest.' A few minutes later, he had returned with a very-familiar woman in tow, her short hair cropped to match her boyish grin, looking surprisingly comfortable in a tailored suit jacket to cover her tanktop and jeans.

"Everyone," Keith had declared, making a grand gesture of entrance. "I'd like you to meet Rachel Maddow, the newest member of the Pundit Round Table. Say hi, Rachel."

"Hi!" Rachel had beamed at them. "Where should I sit?"

"Wait just one second here, missy," Stephen had slurred, clearly drunk. He had been on his fourth Tequila already, so it was probably a good thing that Jon had prearranged to be his designated driver. "This - this here is a boy's-only society, got it? Must show your dick to enter. Do you have a dick?"

Rachel had laughed, over the sound of Jon frantically trying to hush Stephen and kick him in the shins at the same time. "No, I don't have a dick," she had said pleasantly. "But I find that dicks are overrated in the grand scheme of things, anyway. You see, it's much harder to hurt me, whereas I can easily knee you in such a way that you'll never pleasure your wife again. See what I mean?"

Stephen had bristled at that, but before he could say anything Jon had already clapped a hand over Stephen's mouth. "Sorry about him, he won't remember anything tomorrow morning," Jon had said, then winked at Rachel. "I, for one, welcome the introduction of a little estrogen into our group. You can sit next to me, if you want."

"Thanks, Jon." Rachel had grinned as she plopped down on the empty booth seat while Jon scooted Stephen and himself closer to the wall. "But, fair warning, if anything gets handsy, I'll be more than willing to give you the treatment I promised Colbert."

Keith had boomed out a laugh and said fondly, "That's my Rachel," before calling for another round. Anderson didn't remember much from the rest of that night, only that Rachel matched them all drink-for-drink and then some, and she even improved the above-average quality of their drinks with her own concoctions that made Anderson's mouth water when he thought about it a half-year later.

And then Jon and Stephen had gone off to Washington, D.C., for their much-talked-and-blogged-about Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, for which Keith and Anderson had to watch from the safety of their bedroom in order not to upset the higher-ups at both of their networks. In Keith's case, that ended up not making much of a difference. First he was suspended for a political donation subclause that almost no one remembered seeing in the MSNBC contract, which was only one of the reasons why he ultimately left MSNBC for good in January, just five months ago. With his departure also went the meetings of the Pundit Round Table; Keith didn't feel comfortable, he'd confessed to Anderson one night, bringing his friends into the mess he'd made of his career and forcing them to choose sides.

Anderson had sat up at that. "Oh, really?" he'd asked, ignoring the chill of the bedroom air on his bare shoulders. "So, what, you want me to get out of your bed, then? God forbid I be the one to mix your business and your pleasure - "

"That's not what I meant, and you know it," Keith had growled before sitting up and wrapping his arms around Anderson from behind. Anderson had shivered a little, arching his back against the warmth of Keith's bare chest, and Keith gripped him all the tighter.

"You - you are mine, all one hundred percent mine," Keith had breathed into Anderson's ear. "Phil Griffin, of all people, will not ever take you away from me. Believe me, I'm not in the least worried about that. Now get back in here and fuck me already."

Anderson grinned at the memory. If anything, Keith's time off had made him hornier than ever. After he'd managed to break his foot, he was practically incorrigible when it came to sex. Anderson had, more than once, threatened to call the doctor to ask if sex was really an acceptable form of physical therapy. Keith had only laughed, kissed him, and dragged Anderson to bed anyway. Not that Anderson was complaining; he loved Keith, he loved everything they did together, and the sex was probably the second-best part - the best part being the mornings they spent entwined in each other's arms, aware of New York City bustling on its morning routine below them but content to spend the hour watching each other instead.

Speaking of, it was high time for Anderson to go. It seemed like a quiet night, and no use staying out until dawn if there wasn't anything to take care of. Anderson walked to the edge of the observatory deck, adjusted his grappling hook, and fired at the nearest building before leaping over the guardrails of the balcony and disappearing into the night.

~

It was an unspoken agreement between Keith and Anderson that they would keep their living arrangements as separate as they had been before they'd met, but one of them would always go to the other's place to spend the night. It was the best way to keep the tabloids from picking up on the fact that Anderson had a new boyfriend, or that Keith was now interested in prematurely-gone-grey men; and while neither of them had anything against hiding the relationship, they both enjoyed their privacy as much as the next person and shared a mutual distaste of lewdly-speculating tabloid headlines with their names in them.

When Anderson clambered through his bedroom window that night, then, he found Keith already waiting for him in the bed that they shared, his booted foot propped up on an extra pillow with his laptop resting atop another pillow that wobbled as Keith typed. Molly quickly abandoned Keith's stomach in favor of bounding off the bed and attacking Anderson in a paroxysm of joy. Anderson gladly scritched behind her ears before shooing Molly back to the bed while he followed behind her, dumping his bag on the floor near the closet in the process.

Keith didn't even look up from his laptop when Anderson leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. "Hey," he said, distractedly.

"Hey." Anderson settled on his half of the bed and started to work out of his costume. His efforts caused the bed to bounce and shake, but Keith didn't stop his hunt-and-peck typing even when Anderson finished undressing and scooted closer, wrinkling the bedsheets in his wake. "What're you working on? Is it the new show?"

"No, my blog. Special Comment, I'm posting it now and taping it tomorrow." Keith finished typing for another few minutes in silence, and only when he was done did he look up and seem to realize Anderson was there, next to him, and wearing nothing but boxer shorts. "Well, hello there."

"Hello." Anderson grinned. "The night job was light tonight."

"I can see that." Keith stretched his legs out and wiggled his bare toes thoughtfully. "Well, I guess we could always just, you know, get some sleep."

"Are you kidding? Sleep?" Anderson pressed his lips to the skin under Keith's jaw. Keith growled and arched his back, but said nothing. "I can sleep when I'm dead."

Keith suddenly stiffened under Anderson's touch. "Don't say that," he breathed. "Don't even joke - just, don't."

"Besides," Anderson continued as if nothing had happened, rubbing Keith's shoulders with both hands until the muscles loosened. "We haven't had real sex for, what, a week now? I say it's high time we put in a little make-up overtime for that."

"Hey, I'm an injured man," Keith protested without much force behind it.

"That's never stopped you before. Also, I'm pretty sure it was your foot that you broke, not your dick." Anderson gently pushed Keith back so that the older man lay on his back while Anderson side-straddled him from above. "For which I am very, very grateful."

Keith's throaty chuckle sent shivers down to Anderson's thighs. "Oh, go ahead, then," Keith whispered. "Go on, have your wicked way with me, handsome."

Anderson beamed. "I thought you'd never ask," he said, and that was the last full sentence either of them spoke for the rest of the night.

~

At the very moment Anderson was lowering himself on top of his willing lover, in a dark and dingy walk-up apartment in another part of New York City, a man sat on a chair, waiting.

Waiting for what, this man did not exactly know. Over the course of the previous thirty-six hours, he had been drugged, blindfolded, tied up, tied down, kicked, beaten, and who knew what else had happened while he'd been unconscious. This man didn't even know that he was in New York City: he only knew that at one point he had been walking through the streets of an open-air market in Cairo when two Americans had come up and asked him in broken Arabic for directions. He'd responded in his own passable English, and then one of them had held up an open glass bottle to his nose. There was the smell of something spicy, like ginger or cinnamon, and the last thing he had seen was one of the men capping the bottle while the other caught him by both arms as he had slowly collapsed into darkness.

All this the man remembered as he sat on the chair, his hands tied firmly behind his back with a plastic ziptie, his feet tied to the chair legs in a similar manner, and a cloth bag pulled down over his head and cinched loosely around his neck. He twisted back and forth in the chair, chafing at his wrists until his fingers were wet with sweat or blood, but nothing would give. He stopped moving only when the door opened and closed, with enough time between the sounds to allow three or four people to enter the apartment where he was being held.

The bag was pulled roughly off of his head, the tightened opening catching on his jaw and causing him to accidentally bite the inside of his cheek. The taste of copper in his mouth was soon overwhelmed by the blinding pain from the halogen light currently being shined into his eyes. When he cried out, he was rewarded with a slap across the face, slicing his upper lip against his teeth.

"What - where am I?" the man gasped out in English, ignoring the fresh trickle of blood down his chin as he vainly struggled to turn his head away from the bright light. "Who are you? What do you want?"

The man who had slapped the prisoner in the chair, the one man out of the three who had entered who was not holding up the light or aiming the assault rifle at the prisoner's chest from the safety of the doorway, stepped closer and partially blocked the light with his body so that the prisoner could begin to regain his sight. "Depends," he said coolly, before drawing a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and proceeding to clean his nails with the main blade. "We could want you either alive or dead," he continued a heartbeat later, still nonchalantly picking at his nails, "but that would depend on whether you really are Dr. Rashid El-Hashem of Cairo University."

"Yes, yes, I - I am Rashid El-Hashem." Rashid's eyes were filled with panic. "What do you want from me?"

"It's what _I_ want from you that's important," said a new voice in a different accent, and Rashid's head snapped away from the man in front of him to the man whose body blocked out the light coming from the doorway, his broad shoulders silhouetted in shadow. The newcomer stepped forward until just his expensive-looking blue pinstriped suit from the neck down and his well-shined shoes were visible. "Dr. El-Hashem. Official head of the Biosciences Department at Cairo University, and unofficial head of the Bioterrorism Department for the Egyptian Ministry. Isn't that right?"

"Y-yes," Rashid stammered, seeing it would be fruitless to deny it. "But - but why does that matter?"

"Oh, it matters. It makes all the difference in the world." The newcomer took another step forward, revealing the shadow of a large nose and a protruding chin. "What I want, Dr. El-Hashem, is for you to work for me. And while you work for me, I want you to tell me everything about your little project you've got going on down in your Cairo lab."

Rashid went pale. How could this man have known about - no, it wasn't possible, how did he even - ? "I - I don't - I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about - "

"Oh, you do. You know it, and so do I. I want you to work for me, and I want you to make me the Morpheus virus." The newcomer's lips slowly curled into a sneer. "And if you don't, you die. So. Do we have a deal?"


End file.
